A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland

Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe)

Contributing To Word-of-Mouth

This is Part 5  (and the last) of a series:
Part 1:Romanceland Meltdown
Part 2: Finding Books – Part 1
Part 3: Finding Books – Part 2
Part 4: Assessing Books
Part 5: Contributing To Word-of-Mouth

(Series based upon a guest post at The Bookish Snob)

________________________

If you’re mining the Internet for everyone else’s opinions about the worth of a romance novel, in order to figure out whether you should buy it or not, it’s only fair that you contribute back to the system in order to keep it going for other readers, too.

Once you’ve read a romance, you should tell others what you think about it.

Romanceland is a changing world — if this series hasn’t convinced you, just wait a while and you’ll see for yourself, if you haven’t noticed already.  Once upon a time you may have thought it was the purview of the professional editors and reviewers to give a public opinion on the worth (or not) of a published book.

Not anymore.

Authors are publishing directly to the public now:  Directly to readers, and cutting out all middlemen.

That means word-of-mouth — readers talking to readers — is now the most effective means of sorting out the quality books.

You may think that adding your simple review or rating to the cacophony already out there will be a waste of time and energy, because no one is going to hear you or pay any attention.  You’re quite wrong, if that’s what you are thinking.  Your review or rating may not get a direct reaction.  You may not get anyone commenting or responding to you.  It’s highly unlikely the author will thank you — authors are taught or trained by hard experience to stay far, far away from reviewers and reviews to avoid publicity nightmares.

However your rating and/or review will be noticed.  I’ve used this analogy before, because it’s an exact one:  I’m a dedicated blogger, and my blog posts get incredible amounts of traffic every day.  Yet I consider myself lucky if I get one or two comments a month on my blog.  But I know that people are reading and reacting to the posts because my stats tell me they are.

It’s the same with reader ratings and reviews.  You may not get any direct reaction at all, ever.  But your review will be read.  The author will absolutely read it, and if your review is a positive one, I promise you the author will be pathetically grateful.  Then, every single potential buyer who considers the book will read your review once you’ve posted it.  You will have influence over their buying decision, and depending on how you write your review, your influence could be small or large.  Your rating will also form part of the average star rating for the book.

Every time you post a review and rating for another romance book, you’re adding to the weight of information out there for other readers to find.

What goes around, comes around.  Romanceland is becoming a true community of readers.  It’ll pay off big time to contribute meaningfully to that community.

Review on Amazon, even if you didn’t buy there

You only have to write one review, then you can copy and paste it to all your favourite review locations.

Amazon should absolutely top that list.

You’re using Amazon as a primary search tool for book titles, and as an assessment database, too.  Putting your review and rating on there is only fair.

There’s a small bonus to adding your review to Amazon, too.  People can rate your review for its usefulness.  So you can get a little feedback on your reviewing!

Once you’ve pasted your review and rated the book on Amazon, consider adding the review to all the “biggies”.  You can pick and choose amongst your favourite booksellers and review sites:

• Barnes & Noble.com
• Kobo.com (which has the potential now of becoming the next Amazon, thanks to the recent Japanese buy out)
• The bookseller where you bought the book, if they allow reader reviews.
• Goodreads
• Shelfari
• Google Books
• The book’s page on Facebook
• Any reader groups you belong to
• Your own blog, if you have one, or your Facebook page
• A rating line and link back to the review on Twitter

 A review is better than just a rating

Many review sites and booksellers will let you just rate the book and forego the review.  If you’re not good at stringing words together, it might be tempting to avoid writing a review and just click on a star rating and consider your contribution done.

You’ll be short-changing the system if you don’t write a review as well.

No one is expecting perfect prose for reader reviews.  You’ve been reading enough of them yourself to know that they’re not always grammatically perfect, or even close to well-written.  Sometimes even the spelling sucks big time, and if you can pick up on that much, you know you won’t embarrass yourself with your own review, right?

You also don’t have to write pages and pages.  A short paragraph is all you need, explaining why you enjoyed the book — or why not.

Your review, however, should be considered.  If you absolutely hated the book, try very hard to analyse why you hated the book and state it in objective terms in the review.  Don’t just verbally puke all over it and walk away.  That’s not going to help the next reader figure out if the book might still work for her.

It’s also not going to help the author.  If you think the author isn’t going to try to understand why you didn’t like it, again, you’re wrong.  Authors always read their reviews, even the bad ones.  Especially the bad ones.  And yes, they listen.  If enough readers are complaining about the same weakness in a book, you bet the author is going to fix it next time around.  Especially indie authors, who are writing directly for readers.  They need feedback.  So make it constructive feedback.

Your reviews for great books should be just as constructive and considered.  What made it so great?  What works so well in the book to make it fabulous?  Readers will want to know why it’s such a great read — they will want proof that it’s a winner before they buy it.  And the author will want to know what works well so they can repeat it in future books.

Use A Plain Text Editor

Write your review in a plain text editor like Notepad.  Don’t use Word or Wordperfect, because these programs add a lot of hidden coding to your text, so when you cut and paste to websites, all that coding goes with it and can completely screw up your pasting.  Using Notepad ensures there’s no hidden crap, just text.  If you want to use features like Spellcheck and Grammar check, then you’ll have to use a full text editor program like Word, but paste the text over to Notepad once you’re done, then save the file in Notepad as a text file, and shut it down.  Open it again, and then copy and paste to websites.  You’ll have got rid of all the hidden codes this way.

__________

This is the final post of this series.  You now have a full set of tools and a good collection of resources for keeping up with the shifts and upheavals in Romanceland.  The evolution of the romance industry is ongoing and changes will keep happening for quite a while before anything that looks like stability will appear — if it ever does.  In order for you to keep finding the very best romance novels to suit your tastes and preferences, you need to stay on your toes, and keep looking in unexpected places.

Romanceland isn’t the same place it was even a year ago, and it won’t look this way next year.  You have to keep redrawing your map…or simply throw the map away and enjoy the freedom of exploring new territory every day.

Have fun!

Related posts:

1. A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland – Part IV A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe) Assessing Books This is Part 4 of a series: Part 1:Romanceland...
2. A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland – Part III A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe) Finding Books – Part 2 This is Part 3 of a...
3. A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland – Part 1 A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe) Romanceland Meltdown This is Part 1 of a series: Part 1:Romanceland...
4. A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland – Part II A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe) Finding Books – Part 1 This is Part 2 of a...
5. Ease Yourself Into MMF Romances – Part IV Where To Find Your MMF Romances This is Part Four of a Series Part 1: Ménages Categorized Part 2: How can MMF be romantic? Part...

My erotic urban fantasy MMF romance, Blood Knot, has been nominated for vampire book of the year by the reviewers at The Romance Reviews.

Now the voting begins.  Yes, I’m trawling for votes — as this is a “book of the year” vote rather than a book of the week, or weekend or month, or whatever.  Those ones I gave up asking for a while ago.  There’s just too many of them.  But for this one….pleeeeaaaase?  It’d look so pretty on my resume.  :)

Actually, joking aside, this is a very nice tip of the hat toward Blood Knot, because it’s an indie-published title.  Even getting the nomination at all is a massive acknowledgement for me and indie authors in general.

To vote, you will be asked to register, but you can get around that by signing in with your Facebook profile.  Scroll down the the erotic vampire category, and Blood Knot is the second from the top.  Click here to vote …with my thanks!

Related posts:

1. BLOOD KNOT award, FATAL WILD CHILD Review…I’m back! I’m almost scared to start blogging again.  There’s a small mountain of news, tasks, and dust to blow off the site. Not to mention about...
2. Sample BLOOD KNOT And Get A Deal Just for readers of my blog, starting today: a deal for you.  Read the first three chapters of my new erotic urban fantasy romance, Blood...
3. Working Notes – July 4. Blood Knot II If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you already know that my writing and publishing schedule has taken a short detour. Blood Knot has suddenly become...
4. Blood Knot Now Out In Print Some quick housekeeping notes. 1.  Blood Knot, my erotic MMF urban fantasy romance, has just been released in print and is available on Amazon for $11.97....
5. BLOOD KNOT Review and Ranking on Amazon. Yeah, I’m still catching up… I know I said I was back, last post, but I had no idea what a massive liar I was, at the time. Yeah, I...

A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland

Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe)

Assessing Books

This is Part 4 of a series:
Part 1:Romanceland Meltdown
Part 2: Finding Books – Part 1
Part 3: Finding Books – Part 2
Part 4: Assessing Books
Part 5: Contributing To Word-of-Mouth

(Series based upon a guest post at The Bookish Snob)

________________________

By now, if you have set up your Google Alerts; mined the depths of Amazon, romance-related websites, blogs and news sites; plus the various RSS feeds and newsletters you have temporarily subscribed to; along with any romance-related groups you may have joined, you should have built up a satisfyingly long list of potential romance titles to investigate.

The titles you placed on your list you should know very little about, except that for some small reason, they appealed to you, and they’re in your preferred reading niche(s).  The authors, publishers, and general quality of the books could (and should) be a complete mystery to you.

Now, you get to assess those titles and find out if they’re worth buying.

The breakup and fracturing of Romanceland is bringing a flood of new titles onto the market.  There are new e-publishers springing up every day.  They edit their books, yes, but how good are those editors?

There’s no guarantee that just because a book comes from a New York publisher, its quality is guaranteed, either.  Recently, an e-book published by a New York publisher garnered so many complaints about formatting problems, editing and spelling errors in the text and more, that the publisher was forced to withdraw the book from sale and issue refunds.

Too, indie authors’ books have long suffered the reputation of being poorly edited and badly written.  Sometimes this is true.  Often, it isn’t — indie authors are increasingly becoming more savvy about their work; they hire professional editors, and book formatters to build their e-books for them, plus professional cover designers (I do, for instance).  The product indie authors put on the virtual shelves can be indistinguishable from New York books.

There is nothing stopping indie authors from publishing whatever they want, whenever they want.  Titles are hitting the market every day.

The flurry of new e-publishers means those publishers are also pumping out new titles every week, too.

And New York is gamely trying to keep up its output, as well.

The fact is that with the fracturing and breakup of Romanceland, there will be hundreds more exciting, different and interesting romances flooding the market.

The price for all that innovation and creativity is that some of the books are going to suck.  Romanceland is turning into a free market, where anyone can publish anything — and will.  And some of what will be published will be fabulous.  The flip side of getting all that fabulous stuff is that you also get the stinky stuff.

You have to learn how to recognize the stinky stuff before you put your money down.

Relying on other people to tell you what is good is no longer going to work.

No single review site can keep up with the deluge.  They haven’t been able to do that for a while now.  Most review sites run anywhere up to six months behind release dates — or more.  I’ve had reviews of my books emerge up to a year after the book was released.  The lag can only get worse as the number of romance titles released per week rises.

There is no single best-seller list that incorporates every single romance title for sale.  There never has been.  The New York Times Best Seller list, for instance, never included Harlequin/Silhouette category romances, which regularly outsold the #1 best-seller.  The NYT list only started included e-books in mid-2011.  It still doesn’t include indie titles.

There are only two ways you can find out if a book sucks, or if it is worth reading.  One way is to read it.  But that gets expensive, especially if you keep hitting sucky books.

The other way to find out if a book sucks or not is to tap into word-of-mouth sources.  Consult other readers.

There’s a number of ways to do that.  If you use a combination of these tools and resources in a systematic way, then you’ll get a pretty good idea, very quickly, if the book you’re considering is a dud, or not.

Amazon

Amazon is the best place to start, because something like 99% of every romance book ever published is there, and because 99% of every review for the books on there are reader reviews.

In addition, you get reader ratings — the five star rating that is an average of every readers’ rating.

There will also be the odd professional review, too.

Read through all the reviews, both the good and the bad.  Reader reviews are usually not very specific about why a book doesn’t work for them, but see if you can determine why the book failed to please the readers who didn’t like it.  If it is for reasons that won’t affect you (they don’t like European settings, say), then you can safely discount the negative reviews.

If the book gets consistently bad reviews, you may need to cross it off your list.  Put a question mark next to it for now.

If the book is part of the “Look Inside” program, you can even read an excerpt and see if it intrigues you.

Professional Reviews

Hunt down some professional reviews for the book.  Using Google, or your favourite search engine, put in the book title, the author’s name and “review”.

Amongst a few negative results, you will get a listing of links to reviews of the book.  Check them out for overall impressions on the quality of the book.

If the book received crushing reader reviews and ratings on Amazon, and the professional reviews support the bad rap, then it’s probably time to knock the book off your list.

However, if the reviews are all glowing, or even just generally positive, you can move onto the next step, if you are still uncertain about whether you want to buy the book or not.  If you’re already convinced you want the book and are comfortable enough to buy it, then you don’t have to search for further word-of-mouth.

While you are browsing the review sites, if you find that there is a particular reviewer whose voice you like, bookmark the site, or subscribe to their feed.  This is a reviewer who reviews romances in the niche you read.  They may review a romance you will like in the future.  It could pay to keep up with their reviews.

Goodreads

Goodreads and other social reading networks will provide you with one more average reader rating on the book you’re researching — if it has been listed on that network.

There may also be the odd reader review (more like short comments).

The feedback you get from these reader networks usually isn’t comprehensive, but it will provide confirmation and back-up for whatever you’ve already learned about a title.

Reader Groups

If you belong to a reader group, this is the perfect place to actively ask for information.  Put the question to your group:  “What did you think of xxxx?”

If the group has archives or a database of titles you can access, even better.  You can check out members’ reviews of the title for yourself.

Too Little Information

It sometimes happens that a title is too new to have gathered enough information to help you make a decision about its quality.  There won’t be any, or too few, reader reviews on Amazon to reassure you.  If a title is very new, there likely won’t be any professional reviews for it, either.  If it is an indie title, professional reviews are even harder to acquire as many review houses refuse to review indie authors at all.

In this case, what you can do is:

1)   Read an excerpt of the book and check the quality that way.  If the excerpt reads okay, and you don’t notice any obvious grammar and spelling mistakes, typos or other formatting flaws, then the rest of the book should be of similar quality.

2)   Go to the author’s website.  If there are any reviews or positive feedback at all, there’s a good bet the author will have them listed there for the title. (But keep in mind that the author won’t report bad reviews!)

3)   Research one of the author’s other, older titles, in the same or a similar niche as the one you’re interested in.  If that other title got glowing reviews and high ratings, then you’re probably on safe ground with the new book.  Check several of the author’s books, if you really want to be sure.  If they’re all high ratings and good reviews, you’ll feel that much more certain about the new book — and you’ll have more titles on your to-buy list, too!

Sometimes you’ll hit a book where there’s little information and no other titles by the author.  (Every author has a first or second book).  Ultimately, you’ll have to make a decision about whether to buy, or not, based on your gut feeling.

If it’s an indie author, the chances are the price will be very low, so taking a chance on the book won’t be such a big deal.

For New York titles, where the price isn’t so reasonable, you may decide to wait a few days or weeks until the book has gathered reviews and ratings…or not.

For any title where the blurb and excerpt have really grabbed you by the throat and you decide to risk it; go for it.  Why not?  Sometimes you just have to jump in with both feet and see where it takes you.  And sometimes that jump will pay off with the most unexpectedly delightful story you’ve read in ages.

That’s the bonus of a free Romanceland market.  You get to be surprised and delighted every now and again, when you reach out and try something new.

Enjoy your hunting.

__________

Next:  Contributing to Word-of-Mouth

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1. A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland – Part III A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe) Finding Books – Part 2 This is Part 3 of a...
2. A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland – Part 1 A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe) Romanceland Meltdown This is Part 1 of a series: Part 1:Romanceland...
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A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland

Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe)

Finding Books – Part 1

This is Part 2 of a series:
Part 1:Romanceland Meltdown
Part 2: Finding Books – Part 1
Part 3: Finding Books – Part 2
Part 4: Assessing Books
Part 5: Contributing To Word-of-Mouth

(Series based upon a guest post at The Bookish Snob)

________________________

With Romanceland fracturing and thousands upon thousands of new publishers and authors self-publishing their romances every weeks, the first challenge for you as a reader is knowing where to find all the new titles.

After all, you don’t want to miss out on a potentially brilliant new (to you) author, or a fabulous romance that could pass by you unnoticed if you don’t have your ear to the ground, or the right tools and connections for hearing about it.

All the old ways of keeping up with newly published romances just don’t cover all the virgin territory being opened up in Romanceland these days.  Not all review sites and romance oriented sites will cover every publisher out there.  Some have a policy of “only” dealing with New York publishers (still).  Many refuse to deal with indie authors at all, not allowing them to list themselves as authors, or list their books, or reviewing their books.  And many publishers and authors simply can’t keep up with all the thousands of blogs, sites and social networks out there that list and review romance books (I know I can’t).

You must bear in mind that these days, there is simply no single source of information that will provide you with all there is to know about romance novels.  You’re going to have to build your information from multiple sources.

Keep this motto in mind:  “No one knows everything.”    The best anyone can do is become an expert on a small sub-niche of a category…and even that will become more and more difficult as authors grab hold of the idea that they can pretty much write any sort of romance they want, now, and publish it…and so you will find all sorts of cross-over, mixed-genre, wildly different and almost impossible to categorize romances flooding the market.  Soon, it will become easier to simply say “The sort of romances xxxx writes,” in order to indicate a genre.  Romance categories will become that specialized.

So, your first step, as I mentioned, is finding titles.

And because many titles you will be finding will be indie published and small press published, and from sources you don’t know, your next step will be assessing if the romance title is worth buying.  But that will be the subject of the “assessment” post.

For now, you need tools and methods for finding romance titles.

Building your potential titles list

The Strategic Approach

As you build your list, keep a few key strategies in mind:

Go For Quantity

The intention at this stage is not to narrow down your selection at all.  Put on the list any romance title that tweaks your interest at all, for whatever reason.  Later, in the assessment stage, you can knock it off the list after further consideration.  But if it nudges your curiosity, put it on the list.  The more the merrier, at this stage.  Do not be fussy about where the romance came from, who published it, who wrote it, and even try to ignore the cover, if it’s not brilliant.  There’s more than one fantastic romance out there with the suckiest cover ever.  The cover has nothing to do with the way the author wrote the book.  If there is anything remotely interesting about the book — the blurb, the (sub)genre, the hero’s occupation, whatever catches your eye or attention — it doesn’t matter — add the book to your list.

Be open minded

If you’ve only ever read vampire paranormal romances, and you insist on only collecting romances titles in that narrow niche, then you might be missing out on some wonderful reads.  I’ll have more to say about niches, keywords and genres in a minute, but for now, consider expanding your genre horizons…even just a little.  By looking high and low in all sorts of unusual places, you may find other “genres” that suit your tastes right down to the ground, that you never knew existed — or simply didn’t exist until recently.  But you have to do the looking, first, and that means opening up and exploring, rather than staying with your tried and true category(ies).

Break your genres into keywords

You more than likely already have one or two or more favourite subgenres of romance novels that you prefer to read.

Because Romanceland is breaking up and the categories are fracturing, shopping around by categories will become impossible, soon.  Besides, most of the on-line bookstores offer woefully inadequate search facilities within the “romance” category, and brick and mortar bookstores rarely break down their romance shelves at all.  Given how many thousands of books are released each month, that makes reading each blurb impossible.

You need to drop down to the next level of search granularity in order to find what you need.  And that level is keywords.

It will need a bit of brainstorming to start will.  Write down your preferred categories of romance novels, and beneath each of those categories, write down a handful of keywords that you consider important for each category.  It is critical that you select keywords that are relevant to you.

Here’s an example.  Say you like erotic romantic suspense.  Now, there are dozens of potential keywords you could pick for that category: Sex, guns, suspense, crime, rape, serial killer, black ops, SEALs, military, undercover, spies, espionage, political thriller, war and on and on.  Romantic suspense is a big field.

But when you think about the sorts of romantic suspense you tend to enjoy the most, you realize that most of them are military ones.  So that’s your first keyword:  military.  And you like them sexy and hot.  So erotic goes in there.  And of course, there must be romantic suspense.  And you think you prefer Black Ops to straight military operations.  So there are your keywords:  military, erotic, romantic suspense, black ops.    There are both very broad and quite narrow keywords in the collection, so you will end up with some good search results from these keywords.

Go through each of your favourite romance categories and create keyword groups for each type of romance you like.  If there’s two or three subgroups within a category (say, you like werewolves and vampire paranormals) create two different groups of keywords, with repeat keywords as necessary for each group (each might have “erotic”, say, or “menage”).  Don’t forget to include “romance” in there, too.  My example above had “romantic suspense” which covers the “romance” keyword.

If there is a category you think you might like to try, create a keyword group for that, too.

Now to go searching.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are kinda cool, because they send all the good stuff back to you, once you’ve set them up.  You just sit back and see what comes to you from across the Internet.

You can choose to set up an Alert for once a day or week or month.  I usually set for once a day, unless it’s a wildly popular and heavy hitting Alert, in which case I’ll drop it back to once a week.  That rarely happens.

You set the Alert up to search on all the keywords in a group.  Surround each compound (multi-word) keyword in a quote mark so Google doesn’t return results on each single word.  Do include all the keywords in each group in one Alert.

Set up a different Alert for each keyword group you have developed.

The Alert will return to you each day any news site, website, or blog that has created new content that includes all your keywords, or most of them, along with live links to those sites.   This is invaluable in your hunt for new romance titles.

Just scanning the brief summary of page contents included in each Alert will probably provide half-a-dozen titles and authors that you can add to your list, right there.

Clicking on the links and following them back to the source pages will give you further titles.  The types of pages that Alerts reports on are a) news b) websites and c) blogs.  For the sake of finding new romance titles, I’ll break them down the same way Google does, so you can figure out useful ways to deal with them when you find new ones inside your Alerts.

News sites

Google treats any website that isn’t a blog, but has a high volume turnover in timely, current content as a “news” site.  Some sites are news sites, while others who do not style themselves specifically as news sites still get classified that way by Google because of the timeliness and volume of their content.  The number of hits you’ll get for news sites will be fairly low, but they’re usually worth following up just to see what the site is like to deserve the classification.

When you come across a new “news” site that is dealing with Romanceland content, check out first to see what titles they’re mentioning with your keywords, and add the titles to your list.

Then spend some time on the site and see if it has anything else of value to offer you.  Does the site deal in lots of titles around your favourite categories?  Or was the title that tripped your Alert an oddity?  Were they disparaging it?  If so, perhaps the news site will be of little value in the future.  If they’re raving about the title, dig a bit deeper and see if the site has other titles mentioned like it.  Add them to your list, too.  (Remember, quantity!)

If the site has a newsletter you can subscribe to for a month or so, to check out their future offerings, bookmark the site and sign up.  You can always unsub later.

When future Google Alerts direct you to the site, you’ll get further confirmation of this newsite’s usefulness, too.

Blogs

Blogs are plentiful in Romanceland.  There are review blogs, author blogs, and general romance blogs galore.  Publishers and agents have blogs.  Everyone is into blogging.  So a vast number of your Google Alerts will be for blogs, especially because blogs update their content frequently.

Just as for news sites, follow the Alert link back to the blog and check it out.  Add any romance titles mentioned to your list.

Then spend some time reading posts and checking out the blog to see if it has anything of value to offer you.  If it seems valuable and relevant, subscribe to the RSS feed via your reader or email.  Then you can monitor the blog for a week or a month and farm the posts for book titles, while assessing if the blog is worth staying subscribed to.

If the blog is an author’s blog, find (somewhere on the site) a list of that author’s books and add them to your list.  If the Alert directed you to this author based on your keywords, there’s a good bet that her books fit your preferred reading.

Review blogs need to be treated a little differently.  They handle a vast range of romance books, in all sorts of categories that may or may not fit your keywords.  You can try searching their review database to see if you can find books in your keyword group.  If finding books in their archives is difficult, then you may have your first clue as to how useful the review blog will be in the future.

Also try reading one or two reviews of books that are in categories close to what you like.  How do the reviews read?  Are they badly written?  Insightful?  Spelled correctly?  (You’d be surprised.)  Is every single review a glowing recommendation?  Is every single review a bloody mauling?

By the way, you’re not looking for a single review blog as the ultimate guidance on books.  But if you find a review blog that seems to be even-handed and fair, and handles the sorts of romance books you want to read, then it’s worth adding them to your collection of resources and tools.  They will become a part of your group of word-of-mouth peers.

If you think the review blog that your Alert has sent you to might fit the bill, then subscribe to their feed for a week or two, and check them out.  But don’t be afraid to off-load them if you don’t like the feel of their reviews; if they fail to appear in any more Alerts; or if you find you’re not adding any titles to your list from their reviews — any of the above means they’re not useful.

This same thinking/sorting applies to any blog that your Google Alerts directs you to.  Assess and farm for titles.  Monitor via RSS feed for a while to see if the blog might be useful, and watch to see if Google comes back with further Alerts.  If the blog doesn’t a) pop up in more Alerts, b) provide you with more titles for your list and c) doesn’t impress you with its RSS feed; then its time to cut it loose.

Websites

Websites are the “everything else” category in Google Alerts.  If a site isn’t a blog or a news site, it’s a website.  Websites are static, with the least amount of change in content.  Having said that, there are some very active websites out there.

Treat Alert links to websites just as you would for blogs:  Assess and farm the site for titles.  Consider its usefulness.  However, there will be no RSS feed for you to subscribe to, so check if there is a newsletter or some other way for you to get site content coming to you, and subscribe as necessary.  If the site doesn’t offer a way to send you content, then give up.  You don’t want to have to remember to go to them.  There’s a dozen other sites who will give you the same information.  Just move on.  If the site does keep providing great titles, the Google Alerts will tell you, and you’ll be building alternative resources and tools, too.

Next post, we’ll consider even more sources on the Internet that will provide even more romance titles to add to your list, before you start assessing the titles for their quality.

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A Toolkit And Compass for Romanceland

Because All The Roads Are Being Re-Built (Maybe)

Romanceland Meltdown

This is Part 1 of a series:
Part 1:Romanceland Meltdown
Part 2: Finding Books – Part 1
Part 3: Finding Books – Part 2
Part 4: Assessing Books
Part 5: Contributing To Word-of-Mouth

(Series based upon a guest post at The Bookish Snob)

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How you shop for romance novels and how authors write and sell them is going through a fundamental revolution right now.  You, the reader, will benefit from the massive changes that aren’t just coming down the pipe…they’re already here.  They just haven’t popped into gear all over town yet.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, then you get this stuff.  So you’ll like what I’m about to tell you, if you don’t already know it.  Most of what I’m about to say you’ll understand intuitively.  It just makes sense.  But it takes someone saying it out loud to make it jell.

The publishing industry is transitioning from paper books to electronic books.  Soon, paper books will be like candles:  they’ll still exist, but they’ll be expensive specialty items, while the majority of the world uses e-books by default.  Already, e-books outsell paperbacks and many publishers are already considering paperback rights to be subsidiary rights to e-book rights.  About the only real mystery is how long the shift takes to happen.

But the next big revolutionary step is that authors are shrugging off royalty-paying publishers altogether, and moving to self-publishing, using a number of platforms that let them publish e-books directly to on-line booksellers like Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and All Romance E-books.  They’re becoming independent authors.

This second revolution is the one that is causing the most angst in the industry right now, because it will topple the centuries old power structure that used to exist, where publishers used to dictate which books got published, usually with two year production schedules for each title.  Now, authors publish their books as fast as they can write them, which means you, the reader, get to pick from all the books that are written, instead of just the books the publishers think you might like.

The other benefit of this revolution is that authors are pitching their prices very, very low. $2.99 and 99 cents are common prices. Free is not unheard of.  Indie authors can afford to set these prices, because they are getting the lion’s share of the profit from each sale.  Legacy publishers can’t afford those prices because they have huge expenses to off-set, and they are struggling to come to terms with the whole idea of “cheap equals more sales”.

Indie authors who have several titles out there already have noticed a buying pattern emerging:  Readers will buy one “test” title.  Then they’ll come back and buy every single title the author has released, in one buying session — because the prices are so low.  Or they’ll buy all the titles in one series, in one shopping session.  Then they’ll come back and buy the next series, later.

This group-buying and author-buying trend points toward the future.

So does indie-publishing in general.  Because Amazon, Smashwords, and other on-line bookstores have virtual bookshelves, there is no competition for space.  An author doesn’t have to get “permission” to upload.  She just uploads.  As long as her book is correctly formatted, and she follows a few simple rules, she can publish any novel she cares to.

This has huge implications for the future of popular fiction, and for you, the reader.

Whereas once upon a time, the bookshelves at your local store were strictly limited to “romance” and maybe “fantasy”, and you had to carefully comb through them to find the authors you knew, or an imprint you knew that published the sort of books you liked. However, with virtual book sellers, the game has changed.

Indie authors can publish any sort of cross-genred, out-of-genre, weird-mixed, wonderfully inventive, whole-new-unique-to-her-genre romance they want.  It can have fairies and giants, krakens and mushrooms, as long as it has a happy-ever-after and a to-die-for hero (perhaps the only two constants of a romance, these days.)  Her romance doesn’t have to fit into a pre-defined category anymore, because she doesn`t have to get an editor of the big six publishing houses to like it to get it published.  If the romance works, the author can publish it and let the readers decide if it`s good, or not.

Of course, it helps that her romance be well written, or no one will read it.  But that’s one of the joys of the indie publishing game.  We enter it at our own risk.  If an author can’t write for peanuts, she’ll soon find out — the hard way.  Readers get to tell her with their wallets.  The indie publishing scene is a perfect feedback mechanism, because authors get their feedback directly from the readers via sales and/or communications like blogs and emails.  (But sales are more truthful.)  No gatekeepers like agents and editors exist to filter and distort the information.

So what will happen to the romance industry in the near future?

Here’s what I think will happen.  Here’s where I can see it going.  Here’s where I think you, the reader, get to have it all.

More and more authors are going to go indie.  And they’re going to realize they can write the books they really want to write, instead of staying in the straight jackets that the publishers, marketers and brick & mortar booksellers have insisted on for years.

That means the romance field is going to explode with interesting and varied romances the likes of which you have never seen before.  The shackles will be off authors’ imaginations, and you are going to have a buffet of romances to choose from, and not too many signposts to guide you.  If you thought the explosion of e-books from epublishers made it difficult, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

That means you will need to build your own tools and sources for finding decent romances.  It will no longer be good enough to simply buy up everything a single publisher releases, because you`ll be limiting yourself to a tiny corner of the market and (possibly) quickly grow bored with your romances.

Word-of-mouth about hot new series and titles will become the best way to find out who to buy next, because there will simply be so many authors out there, you won’t know who will be a good fit for your tastes, after you’ve bought up every title of the last author you fell in love with.  Amazon’s “if you like this, you’ll like that” links will help, but they won’t always tell you if the author they’re recommending can’t spell worth a damn or if the novel is full of grammar mistakes and typos…or if it’s just plain bad.

This is where you adding reader reviews and ratings becomes incredibly important, too.  If you’ve never bothered before, think about starting now.  Soon, readers will be the only guide for other readers.

The romance industry is already huge.  It’s about to become a giant industry, because romance authors, who were at the forefront of e-books and e-readers, are also now embracing indie publishing with a vengeance, too.  With their imagination, and with all the paranormal and fantasy worlds to explore, and the historical and romantic suspense fields to re-invent, mash-up, and re-live, you as a reader are in for thousands of special treats.

You just have to learn how to find them, because authors won’t be able to reach out and be heard across the whole industry.  It’ll be too damn big.  You’ll have to meet us half-way.

This series will offer you a set of tools, ideas, tips and tricks for finding good romances no matter where they’re hiding, and for making sure you’re staying on top of continual changes in the landscape of Romanceland.

Next:  Finding Books.

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